Papyrus Reader story
Two years ago I finished my PhD.
PhD’s nowadays take 3 years to finish.
In these 3 years I struggled finding the right tool to help me with my research. I tried Zotero, Docear, Mendeley, Evernote and in the end chose EndNote in combination with Dropbox.
However one problem still remained: reading. Although EndNote integrates with MS Word and stores both citations and original text in PDF or another format, you still do the reading from Adobe Reader. This makes researching an activity where you need to open multiple documents, in multiple windows.
10 weeks ago I started the Interaction Design Capstone Project with this idea in mind, to help other researchers have a better reading experience.
In the need finding interviews I talked to researchers and other avid readers and found out two main issues they were facing: their mind drifting away from the main text because of the many links and making reading a social experience (being able to share and get recommended books).
In the prototyping phase I tried to combine some common concepts implemented by other reader apps and use them to achieve my purpose. I came up with two basic concepts:
- Parallel books
, and
- Book in book
The prototypes had many similarities except for the main navigation system. The parallel books reader (which I called Mindflow Reader) had a navigation menu similar to Google Play books, accessible by touching the page in the middle. The book in book reader (which I called Papyrus Reader because of the ancient book support that was the papyrus scroll) had no menu whatsoever and instead stitched new texts inline.
Another point I tried to cover was handling words that linked to multiple documents. For example you may have an idea that is addressed by other three scientific papers. Today in a regular PDF reader you would have to read first the [1] reference then go to the bottom of the page and read the details. Worse is that citation details usually are found at the end of the document which makes you almost completely lose focus of the main text. I tried to tackle this by creating a list that pops in at the bottom of the screen offering you the possibility to choose what to read next based on the title and a short description.
What surprised me was that users had a hard time understanding my preferred solution which had the Google Play Books navigation menu and instead found it easier to use the second version. So I chose the second version as final and for A/B testing I tried to find out what goes better: a vertical or a horizontal navbar to control linked documents. The results were as expected, namely that a horizontal navbar is a more common convention making it more feasible.
Last but not least is the Suggested and Recommend functionality that allows you to make reading a social experience.
In conclusion, you can interact with the final version by clicking:
Papyrus Reader
Some final notes:
- throughout the project I used marvelapp.com to have users try out my prototype
- some people asked: how will you obtain the electronic texts with links. Answer: Scientific papers in PDF are already constructed like this, so only the import mechanism must be setup.